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At that time, ethnographic and cultural intelligence was used in a classified U.S. intelligence program created in 1964, called Project CAMELOT. The use of anthropologists was supported through grants laundered by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations. Most of Stanley Ann's activities under USAID in Java were funded by the Ford Foundation."
Project Camelot is worth knowing about because something like it might be tried again. The Army (and perhaps other agencies) sought in 1964 to enlist sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists, and other social scientists in a project portrayed as an effort to understand what makes a democracy stable. With these findings the United States could seek to strengthen Latin American democracies by contributing to those forces for stability. Building up a middle class and creating independent judiciaries were among the actions envisioned. A small number of well-respected social scientists signed up for the project. For the most part, these academics were liberal anti-Communists who strongly favored the idea of strengthening democracies in Latin America.
Then people began to realize that the purpose of the project could easily be turned on its head: what can make a democracy
unstable? At that time there were emerging democracies and quasi-democracies in Latin America that scared the U.S. in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Chile was to be the site of the first project, and in the 1970s the U.S. moved to overturn the results of a democratic election (Allende) -- by coup rather than by employing what Project Camelot might have discovered.
Army funding was concealed but not by those private foundations. The Special Operations Research Organization, which had a
very loose affiliation with the American University in Washington, provided the cover. Johan Galtung of Norway was instrumental in exposing the Army funding of what appeared to most prospective researchers to be an academically-based research program of some merit.
Project Camelot was never classified, although its funding was indeed hidden. The project never got off the ground; Congressional hearings killed it in 1965. The reputations of some very good social scientists were badly smudged, and for a period all social science research conducted in Latin America was suspect. Some governments made it impossible for American social scientists to work in their countries. Even the empirical methods of American social science were rejected in favor of a Leninist "Who needs facts when you know the truth?"
It is the case that private foundation funding and secret CIA funding supported several other projects at American universities, most notably MIT. Some of the universities that received such funding insisted that the results of the research could never be censored, much less withheld, at the direction of the CIA. Some did not do so. Today, many leading research universities will not undertake classified research under any circumstances.
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